Centrais

The problem

The Defensoria’s urgent-matters centres work outside court hours, both in the courts of guarantees, in criminal cases, and on urgent civil matters. Organising who works, recording what was done and closing each period for payment involves complex business rules.

What was built

A system for the whole cycle of work in the urgent-matters centres, from sign-up to payment:

1. Defenders sign up, and an algorithm distributes the slots according to parameters set by the administration.
2. When their turn ends, each defender writes their own report.
3. The Institutional Affairs department closes the period, which generates the load files sent to the Defensoria’s payroll.

How it was built

I built the system in about 15 days of intense, solitary work, because the business rules were complex and there was a rush for the Defensoria’s work to start at the same time as one of the courts of guarantees the Judiciary was opening. I started from an earlier system by Giovanni Milanez, which was already fairly advanced and well structured, but it needed heavy changes because of the qualification module and the greater complexity of the new scheme.

On the eve of going live, the system was taken over by the systems unit of the IT Directorate. There it was built collectively in a very short time (a trial by fire): setting up the infrastructure, making changes, fixing the bugs I had left, and improving the architecture and the back-end issues my lack of expertise had not let me fix. It was the first user-facing system the Defensoria’s IT Directorate was asked to put live. It was no easy challenge, but it all worked out (thank you to everyone involved; you have my respect for what you taught me).

Today Centrais is fully part of the portfolio maintained by the information systems unit. I act as Product Owner and still develop some smaller issues.